Is Google cleaning their index?

Yes This is strange but experencing same thing as well.

 

Something like this does drive you nuts. That is one main reason why I never totally rely on Google for the bulk of my traffic. You never know what could happen with anything that is not in your control so relying on it would be risky.

 

It happens now most frequently.

 

yeah, exactly. even though I went from over a million pages in google to less than 300, my traffic on that site dropped maybe 10 or 15%. it generates a ton of word of mouth traffic.

that's a good place to be, I suppose, but I still wouldn't mind being back in the index.

 

How do you NOT rely on Google for the bulk of your traffic?

Like it or not, Google still has almost 50% of the SE market with the remainder shared among all others. Of course, the object is to rank well in ALL search engines but if a sizeable portion of your traffic is NOT coming from Google, you are missing out on a lot of traffic.

 

You're absolutely right Minstrel. However depending on the objectives of the site, (ie: generate adsense revs), I'm seeing that I get a lot of traffic from G and a certain percentage of that traffic generates me adsense revs. Interestingly enough, I get less than 30% of G's total traffic from MSN but get almost 1/2 as many PPC clicks per month. I am starting to conclude that there may exist an anomoly in the terms of users using each engine. Perhaps the G audience is a little more savvy than MSN traffic. These are my observations, and dearly wish I could understand why!

 

I think that's true. I get almost no traffic from Yahoo (indeed, the top three for me are Google, MSN, and AOL) but I have friends who sell products online who get quite a bit from Yahoo. That leads me to believe that there's a different demographic using Yahoo and that it may be more important to list well in Yahoo for websites selling merchandise than for sites offering services or information. I'm not quite sure where MSN Search fits in that mix.

 

Seeing the thread's actual title, i want to say :

IS Google like damaged ? screwed ? defective ?

I only have 170 pages for Webxperience now. I used to have 60k, than 20k (after i marked the review and rate pages, with a nofollow), and now 170 ?

I sincerly am trying to figure this out, because i saw many other people have this issue.

Traffic has not decreased at all, as you said earlier Minstrel.

 

There may exist a "positive" weight preference for shopping/commerce related sites on yahoo. Yahoo does have one up on G and M, (right now and for a while back) for shopping sites with their yahoo stores. So they may be trying to capitalize on user demographics that fit into "shoppers". MSN on the other hand is a real puzzle, as it is easy to place on their index but usually see a little more "spammy" sites placing higher than perhaps sites that are a little more content focused. While G, man o man, they just get better and better and better!!

 

I am really starting to think this may not be an issue of how many pages are actually indexed but rather a question of how many pages Google is reporting - similar to what they did with the links: query a while back.

Normal searchers probably don't even know about these sorts of queries - they really exist solely for webmasters. Maybe Google is simply trying to reduce its server loads and some of the measures used to manipulate and sell links by rendering such queries useless.

 

Minstrel may be onto something...

 

Very good observations - I agree!

 

I really think what Minstrel is saying is pretty much true, because when i search pages, that are not included in those 170 pages, at site:www.webxperience.org, they are actually indexed. BUT they do not show up at the site: command.

I am anyway so mad, because it screwed up one of my sales.

 

Wasn't there something posted I think on Matt's blog or on DP saying not to use third party SE scripts and software products to query Google ?

 

What I mean is that I never put all of my advertising efforts and time on only trying to get traffic from Google. I also try and get my traffic coming from alot of other various sources.

If you totally rely on Google for nearly all of your traffic then one day you may get burned.

I learn't this by having a site well ranked in Google and I was getting about 60% of my traffic from them and earning over $100 a day from having this good targeted traffic from them. They then changed the way that they rank sites and also penelize sites and unfortunately this site got banned. I had never read Google's Webmaster Guidelines so I didn't know what I had done wrong as I had just advertised my site as much as possible and that was it.

I then found that once my site was banned I then lost allot of my traffic and my sites revenue had dropped by about 70%, which was alot.

So now I don't totally depend on Google for all of my traffic. I still want alot of traffic from them, but I still go and look for other sources of good traffic even if I have to pay for it.

At the time I look through my site and had noticed that I had a 0 second meta refresh on my 404 error page so that it would redirect straight back to my home page. I thought that this wouldn't really matter as it was on the 404 error page. But once I had stopped that and asked google to look at my site I was back in.

But it took me around 6 months to find out that, that may have been the course. The problem with getting banned from Google is that they never tell you what is wrong with your site and why it got banned. It is up to you to find out exactly what it is and this can involve you re-doing your site time and time again just to see if it meets their Webmaster Guidelines.

I now know much more about their Guidelines now though and make sure that all my sites abide by them.

That's the problem is that I didn't know there were even any guidelines so that is why I done something wrong which I didn't know I was even doing wrong at the time.

 

I do not use such scripts. Or what is your point ?

 

For only one keyword my site No:1, it remains intact. But all others seems changed, upped and downed

 

If you use scripts like Mcdar, DP's keyword tracker/backlink checker, Marketleap, SEO Elite etc ... these script put a real burden on Google (according to what I read). My point is confirming what Ministrel was saying .. maybe G doesn't want to give as much info to webmasters.

 

ive got one site with 300,000 pages index.. drop to 0 around 5 days ago...
not sure the reason but will recheck everything... i think the 404 error thingie could be one.. thanks to john269 for pointing it out...

 

Hi,

It may be best if you check to see if your site is still in their index by checking using, site:domain-name.com

If you can see your site then I guess it has been banned from Google and you will have to start making changes to your site to get it re-indexed. Doing something like this could take sometime.

This is because I am not 100% sure if it was the 404 error thing for me. I had changed many things on my site just because they just wouldn't tell me the exact problem. I also change the 404 error page thing and got accept, but all I know it could have been becaue I had changed something else instead. I had changed so many things you see that I am not 100% sure what it was. This is main because I had re-done most of my site just to try and get it back in. I was trying everything and eventually got it back.